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Expanso Solutions for the Public Sector

Defense Mission Need

Expanso is addressing the challenge of efficiently executing computational tasks where data is generated and stored. Expanso’s software is particularly well designed to work in environments with unreliable connectivity, heterogeneous devices, and complex network infrastructures.

Unlike traditional cloud computing models that require data to be transferred to centralized data centers for processing, Expanso, through the open-source project Bacalhau, provides a Compute-Over-Data (CoD) platform that allows for the distribution and execution of computational tasks across diverse and geographically dispersed devices. The platform is device-agnostic and can work with a diverse array of hardware including video cameras, on-vehicle computational devices, and satellites, etc. Expanso reduces costly and time-consuming data transfers by keeping sensitive data within the local, locked-down environment where it was generated. This has the added benefit of improving security as well.

By supporting Docker containers and WebAssembly (WASM) images, as well as traditional binaries, Expanso provides integration with existing workflows. Users can easily deploy existing software to execute seamless and reliable computation even over challenging networks. In addition, orchestration and management of workflows is highly scalable to many devices.

Defense Use Cases

Some potential use-cases that Expanso could facilitate:

  • Forward Deployments: Enhance operational efficiency and strategic deployment with distributed data processing, especially in contested areas.

  • Remote Compute Platforms: Facilitate software job executions on remote platforms such as underwater, airborne, or space environments.

  • Video Security: Conduct real-time surveillance video analysis and threat detection using machine learning models with no additional hardware.

  • Drone Management: Enable real-time dynamic querying and updating of unmanned devices and vehicles, improving data transport.

  • Transportation Preventative Maintenance: Analyze data of in-field fleet vehicles and engines to optimize maintenance and enhance safety.

Commercial Market

Expanso’s software platform is a generic infrastructure tool that can be used in any industry. Expanso primarily targets those organizations that produce large amounts of data that is created at the edge. Examples of markets that we target are:

  • Organizations with fleets that use our Distributed Fleet Management capabilities. Such as commercial shipping companies and the U.S. military.

  • Organizations that require machine learning through inference models on edge data. This could be used by retail, manufacturing, and security for analyzing video streams while reducing data storage and transmission costs.

  • Organizations with a large number of edge devices that use our software to process device logs. Examples include transportation companies that need vehicle analysis of information, offices that want to evaluate HVAC systems, or corporations that want to use excess capacity on their fleet of computers.

The platform is very adaptable and eventually could be used in nearly any organization - our focus is bridging the challenging global deployments with a flexible, powerful, and reliable framework.

Technology Readiness

Expanso’s Bacalhau software has all key functionalities for demonstration and testing and is well integrated with hardware systems demonstrating operational feasibility. The software is currently in v1.3 (released April 2024, v1.0 was introduced in February 2022) which introduced critical enterprise-level features including security and networking improvements, user authentication, and containerless execution.

Bacalhau is actively developed and used, with over 1,000 unique entities downloading and running the software every month. It is currently also in deployment within the U.S. Navy managing predictive maintenance workloads, Lockheed-Martin detecting engine anomalies, and the City of Las Vegas detecting events in security video cameras.